


Quicksilver

by pipistrelle



Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [17]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Pre-Canon, Sixth House, Slice of Life, a very tiny dash of pining, literally no stakes or plot here just them hanging out, mentions of Cam/Pal/Dulcie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29138154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle
Summary: Scenes from the Sixth.
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Palamedes Sextus
Series: Locked Tomb Flufftober Prompts [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914445
Comments: 15
Kudos: 62
Collections: CamPalentine'sDay 2021, Locked Tomb Prompts





	Quicksilver

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "quicksilver". This is the first thing I started writing in this fandom. Every other 6th House thing I've written started as an offshoot of this, including two sad 6th House things that aren't done yet. I'm so excited to finally get it up here. :D
> 
> For CamPalentine's Day on the Peoples' Tomb discord server! Thanks to the wonderful laney (frostryn) for beta reading!

1.

Camilla Hect, cavalier primary of the Sixth House, was fourteen years old. In aggregate, she had spent approximately four-point-six-repeating of those years in sleep, about two-thirds of a year eating or drinking, and what felt like the remaining eight-point-eight years listening to Palamedes Sextus argue.

She liked listening to him argue, although she didn't argue with him herself, because she wasn't a fool. She felt nothing but disdain and a mild condescending pity for those allegedly wise Scholars, three and four times her age, who had not yet grasped what she had learned after knowing Palamedes for five minutes.

"Master Warden," Dr. Kuusi said, "with all due respect, I believe you'll find that a _thorough_ review of the literature will show that magnetometric thanergy triangulation is the basis of the entire field!"

"I've read the literature, thanks, and mag-triangulation is bunk," the Warden said flatly. "It's nonsense. It's a myth. The _whole field_ is founded on a myth. If you don't want to waste years running up a blind alley, I suggest you find another approach."

At thirteen and ten months, fresh out of his exams, the Master Warden looked like a deep-space telescope that was launched but not yet finished unfolding, all struts and knobbly joints and hunger for data. Beside him, the rotund Dr. Kuusi reminded Cam of a small moon, ponderous and pockmarked. From her perch on a back corner of the Warden’s desk, sharpening her swords, she watched out of the corner of her eye as he started to deflate. `

"Surely you're mistaken, Warden -- why, the Magnometric Committee's latest report --"

"Garbage," said Palamedes briskly. "Nothing personal, but it's true. Cam saw the problem with it in -- seven minutes, wasn't it, Cam?"

In her girlish voice, Cam said "Yes, Warden," and nothing else.

Dr. Kuusi went red in the face, which amused her. He thought she was lying (she wasn't), that no mere teenage aspirant could have understood the brilliance of the Magnometric Committee (she could and had). He also knew that he couldn't say an accusatory word against her, or the Master Warden would be out for his head. It was well known in the Library that Palamedes took insults to his own maturity and intelligence quite calmly, but had once almost challenged a knock-kneed elderly Scholar to a necromantic duel over an implied insult to his terse, angular scrap of a cavalier. 

(That was an exaggeration. The Warden disapproved of duelling and wouldn't have done it even if he knew how. But he _had_ raised his voice, which none of the Scholars had ever heard him do before.)

( _Infantile attachment_ , the Scholars said amongst themselves, and _too much historical literature_ , and _he'll grow out of it_. Cam smiled at that, a ferocious inward smile at the blind unease among all these paragons of wisdom. Only Dr. Zeta seemed to know better. She knew that while the Warden's intellect was quantum-quick and lit on any topic for only as long as it took him to absorb it, his heart was as fixed as a mathematical constant. As steady as a star.)

"It's your assumptions," Palamedes went on, probably oblivious to his interlocutor's growing distress. "They've practically ossified. If you want any more life out of them, you're going to have to call in a Ninth House adept. All your premises are based on a hypothetical that's been dragged along as holy writ for fifteen years. Cam caught it in the tables. Your data's been skewed --"

"Respectfully," Kuusi interrupted, not at all respectfully, "the Warden's Hand is not an expert in _any_ form of thanergetic triangulation, nor is she any kind of Scholar, and a _trained_ eye would see --"

Palamedes cut coldly across his burgeoning protest, surgically and dispassionately as he would lance an infected boil with a bone needle. "You can learn from the Warden's Hand, Dr. Kuusi, even though she isn't a Scholar. A swordswoman who _assumes_ she knows where the next blow is coming from will stop fighting very quickly, and stop breathing in the bargain. Adaptability is survival.” He picked up the stack of flimsy by his hand and dropped it on the desk in front of the good doctor, whose face was now splotched unevenly with rage-flushed capillaries, making him look more like a boil than ever. "Your assumption that you knew where your data was pointing just stabbed you in the foot. This paper won't go in the journal. You can revise it, though you'll waste less of your life by starting over."

Dr. Kuusi had been a Scholar for decades. His pride hadn't addled him so much that he couldn't grind out, "Thank you for your time, Warden," and gather his flimsy before he fled. The autodoor to the Warden's office shut behind him with a satisfying _whoosh_. Palamedes glared at it.

"Shouldn't have lost your temper," Cam remarked, picking up a scrap of flimsy to drop over the edge of her blade. "He's on the board that proctors your exams next term."

"So let him try to dock me. I'll have him up on charges so fast he reinvents NAFAL flight," Palamedes said fiercely, then looked up at her. "What are you smiling at?"

"You. Big talk, all that swordswoman stuff. Like you'd even know which end to hold."

"The one that won't eviscerate me," he said, eternally logical. "It's just things you've said. Did I get it wrong?"

"No. It's just nice to know you're listening."

He pulled a face. "I always listen to you. There’s three people on this rock who are always worth listening to, and you're the only one of them who doesn't proctor any of my exams.”

2.

She loved his title the way she loved a good sword. It had heft and sharp edges, and a myriad’s weight of tradition behind it. It could cut through abstractions and obfuscations like a steel blade through fat.

And just like a blade, he had almost no hope of wielding it without impaling himself. A fourteen-year-old who shouted about his own elevated titles only made himself into a petulant toddler having a tantrum. A fourteen-year-old who enforced penalty for a breach of protocol, or objected to being talked down to, would more likely lose the deference he needed than regain it. If you went by heredity, which the Sixth did whenever possible, someday Palamedes would have enough height to loom in meetings and a pleasing baritone like his father’s that would help him bring obtuse Scholars to heel. In the meantime, she did what she was meant to do and wielded the sharp-edged, dangerous thing for him.

She called him “Warden” in every address, at every meal, in every lecture and committee meeting where she drifted after him even though she had no real reason to be there. In her official post as cavalier primary no one had the power to send her away, except Palamedes, and he was too amused to even consider it. She reminded everyone, inarguably, that he was owed their respect. And, gradually, he was given it.

“They follow your lead because they’re a little afraid of you,” Palamedes told her, almost admiringly.

They were in his shuck, he on the bed in a nest of flimsy, she doing handstands and timing how long she could keep her toes pressed against the low ceiling. Upside-down, through the rush of blood to her head, she said, “Good.” It would serve him well to have someone at his back that his enemies feared a little, even if all it did was make committee meetings go a little faster.

But he was silent, and when she looked up at him it was like a cloud had crossed his deep clear eyes. “I know what you’re doing, and it works —“ this was his highest compliment “— but Archivist Zeta said I should talk to you about it. She thinks it might stunt my psychological development if the person I spend the most time with is over-awed by my authority. She said I should have someone who sees me as just me — just Palamedes.”

Cam slowly rolled herself right side up, considering. At last she said, “You _are_ you. There’s nothing else to see you as. If everyone else only sees the Warden, it’s because they’re idiots. And if I only saw Palamedes, I’d be as bad as they are.”

He thought about that. “You’re not over-awed by my authority, then?”

She stifled a snort. “I don’t think so. If I ever start to feel over-awed, I’ll tell you right away.”

Palamedes beamed at her, luminous with relief. “If you do I’ll be sure to mismatch my socks again, that’ll clear it up,” he said brightly. “Come check this vector for me, will you? I can’t seem to get the damn coefficients to match.”

3.

He sat cross-legged on her bed, his knees and elbows so sharp that he looked like a rack of rapiers knocked into disarray and draped in gray sacking. His spectacles were folded neatly in the top pocket of his robes. A thick dark blindfold sat in their accustomed place over his eyes, and he was wearing yellow earmuffs stolen from one of the machine labs. With a less interesting color palette he'd pass for a depiction of a Ninth penitent. (She understood that the Ninth was quite cold.)

"Respectfully, Warden," she said, "this seems a bit dramatic."

His lips twitched. The earmuffs were spelled to let her voice through, and only her voice, responsive to her particular thalergetic signature. It was a trick he'd taught himself when they were ten.

"Shame on you, Camilla the Sixth. Without experimental rigor we are no better than the Eighth -- I'm _joking_ , don't look so reproachful."

She set down the box she was carrying and perched on the edge of the bedframe. "You don't know that I'm looking reproachful. Baseless speculation. What happened to rigor?"

"It is _not_ baseless, I'm extrapolating based on a decade of experience. Remember the tongs --"

With the chem-lab tongs he'd laid out for her, she dipped into the box, which was full of half a dozen objects swaddled in cotton to his exact specifications. She dropped the first one, cotton wrapping and all, into his outstretched hands with a cheerful “Happy birthday.”

The formal celebration, what there was of it, would be tomorrow. But this was what he had asked for.

He breathed in, out. His fingers moved, very slightly, the sort of tiny adjustments he'd make if he were cradling a fragile baby animal. "Starting easy on me," he complained. "Human heart, owner deceased, male, late fifties. Calcification in the valves and left anterior descending artery. Likely contributed to death, although -- no, cause of death was sudden decompression. Between three and four years ago. Well-preserved; Arkady's work. Oh god, you didn't flirt it out of her, did you?"

Cam made a noise of disgust that was not a "no" and swatted him on the knee, which only made him grin. He went on, "Hardly been handled by anyone since. Although _you_ should have used gloves when you picked it up."

"Pardon me, Warden," Camilla said blandly, "but _I_ thought we were testing your ability to cut through psychometric interference, which is why we aren't doing this in a perfectly good lab. You haven't given me the blood type."

"Don't insult me." He set the wrapped heart aside and held out his hands again. Cam was reminded irresistibly of an ancient illustration she'd seen once of a baby bird begging for worms. She dropped a series of things into his cupped palms one by one and listened to him rattle off facts and identification: a strip of leather from the book-binding workrooms, Master Scholar Hekate's pass-key stolen out of her robe pockets, powdered vitreous humor from one of the anatomy cadavers.

The last one was his favorite. She'd known it would be. Even muffled and blindfolded, his face lit up as he pinched it between his fingers.

"Cam, that's _obtuse_. Downright mean-spirited. No organic material at all, not even residue. None of your signature on it -- well done. Metal -- steel. Low iron content. It's a regulation bolt, could have come from any shielding panel in the Library."

He drew in a breath through his nose. Cam waited. A bead of pinkish sweat formed at his hairline, ran down his temple and vanished into the blindfold. "About seventy years old," he was saying. "So It wasn't replaced in the last refit. You could have pulled it from storage. But there are distortions on the molecular level. Artifacts of vibration."

Watching him work should have been boring since she was, necromantically speaking, as sensitive as a brick. But she knew every furrow of concentration in his brow, the path of each drop of blood sweat, its gradations from pink to cherry to deoxygenated near-black. She knew his tensile strength and snapping point as well as if he were one of her swords. She wasn't technically a Scholar, but she was Sixth down to the nucleotides of her cells, and this was part of her birthright, this deep satisfaction of _knowing_. Of watching an asteroid follow its pre-calculated orbit, sure as gravity. Or watching Palamedes' hands move (flexor pollicus, dorsal interossei) in the familiar thumb-to-finger psychometric pinch. Like the key to a cipher, it made the universe into a place of sense and order.

He was pushing himself a little now, hungry for information, trying to sort signal from noise. Cam found herself straining her ears in sympathy, but it was deep nightcycle. Almost no one in the House was stirring, which was why it had been so easy to steal the fodder for the Warden's experiment.

"Footsteps," he concluded at last, beaming, and ripped off the earmuffs, pulled the blindfold down past his chin like a neckerchief. "Fourth level, by the viewscreens. That's the only area with old, solid heat shielding that gets that kind of foot traffic. Am I right? I'm right. That was _great_ , Cam. How many of the other Scholars could get that kind of detail from non-organics? And without any gel!"

"Maybe Doctor Sex could," Cam suggested. He threw the bolt at her. She caught it without looking. "Bedtime, Warden. Do I need to pull out the sleep-deprivation studies again?"

"I never should have let you read those," he said, as though he could have stopped her. Along with a few studies on the deleterious effects of malnutrition, the sleep-deprivation studies were the most time-honored weapons in the arsenal of a Sixth cavalier.

But he gave in to her raised eyebrow, and when she nudged him he obediently slumped over like a tower collapsing. Then remembered that the bed was hers. "Cam, can I -- do you mind --?"

She rolled her eyes and shoved him over enough to climb in beside him, despite the risk of impaling herself on a stray ulna. "You’ve got half the Library on yours anyway. Should I get you a cot in here?"

He smothered a yawn with the back of his hand. "Yes. I’ll sleep at the foot of your bed, you'll go to the Review Board meeting tomorrow in my robes, and I'll go to the Spire. Judging by the clarity and powers of perception on display in the last _Palimpsest_ , I doubt anyone will notice."

"You don't even know where the Spire is. And you're the editor in chief on the _Palimpsest_."

"Of course I know where the Spire is!" He paused. "At least, I know where it isn't, and by process of elimination that's the same thing. And as the editor I know better than anyone else that the _Palimpsest_ is rubbish. Can't I criticize what I create?"

She rapped her knuckles very lightly against the hard shell of his temporal bone, cushioned by his unruly hair. "Indefatigably, Warden."

He grumbled into her shoulder, then after a while he dropped from bemused, thoughtful silence into sleep, like slipping soundlessly into dark water. Satisfied that the station and the stars and the rest of the universe were spinning as they should, Camilla the Sixth followed her necromancer, always a half-step behind.

4.

Camilla listened very attentively while a pair of senior Scholars explained the situation. When they were done explaining she said, "So the Warden is missing?"

No, no, they hastened to assure her, it wasn't that, the Warden couldn't be _missing_ , it was a small station, he would certainly be found, it was only that --

"Only he isn't where he's supposed to be and no one knows where he is," she concluded. "I can see how that's different from being missing."

It took her about three quarters of an hour to find him, sprawled bonelessly on the catwalk that surrounded the upper tier of the main generator. His right hand at the wrist and his right leg at the knee dangled out into the ten-story empty heatsink shaft.

She looked him over and, finding nothing that needed immediate bandaging or splinting, gathered up two handfuls of robe at his shoulders and pulled him back onto the solid metal of the floor. He remained completely limp, like a dead fish writ large, giving no sign of life other than a deep sigh. 

“Warden,” she said. She poked him in the ribs, which was what she did instead of lecturing.

He sat up, but turned his face away from her, hiding in the gloom half-lit by the reactor lights three stories below. “Go away,” he said to the safety railing. “Please.”

She did not go away. She settled down cross-legged against the railing next to him and locked her arms across his chest like the straps of a shuttle safety harness, resting her chin on his shoulder. His temple grazed her cheek, the wire frame of his glasses catching at her hair. She could feel his ribs against the insides of her wrists. There was so damn much of him, and it was all so scrawny.

He said, "I wasn't going to throw myself in."

"I know."

"I just wanted to -- to get away. Just for a few minutes. To think."

He’d missed four committee meetings, and there were crates of books and artifacts in his office that needed his signature on the transfer papers before they could be officially assimilated into the Library, but she didn’t remind him of any of that. She didn’t need to. 

All she said was, “Well?”

He sighed explosively. It was like hugging a collapsing bellows. “She was very kind,” he said thickly. “Very discreet. But no obfuscation. She said she respected me too much to mince words.”

“Good.” He probably hadn’t destroyed the letter yet. He had undoubtedly memorized its contents —not that he could help it — but he would have stashed the thing itself somewhere, for sentimental reasons. Cam would find it and read it later, to satisfy herself that Dulcinea hadn’t been cruel or mocking. Not that she was the type.

Camilla had tried to resent Dulcinea Septimus, years ago, as a source of unnecessary suffering for the Warden. Ultimately she had found it impossible, especially when Dulcie filled her letters with asides like _ & you must be sure to listen to C., who is a sensible person and will give you sensible advice, unlike frivolous & flighty yrs truly. _And when she‘d seen how careful Dulcie was, ultimately, with the Warden's heart, knowing it for the treasure beyond price that it was.

Dulcie was like that; like a stiletto offhand, slipping past your guard so fast you didn’t have time to see it, let alone defend against it. She’d pierced Cam’s heart as surely as a knife in less than a year. Palamedes had never stood a chance against her. He’d never had any defenses at all.

When they’d been about twelve and it had become clear that Palamedes would someday be the Master Warden and Camilla would be his Hand, she’d decided to rescue Dulcinea from the vulturous, rose-scented clutches of her House. It had all seemed quite simple. The Seventh wanted its heir to die dramatically; the Warden wanted to get her access to reasonable medical treatment and then kiss her a lot (although he would not have admitted that last under the most refined and exquisite of tortures). Camilla had spent boring lectures planning daring missions in which she and the Warden commandeered a shuttle, slipped past the defenses of Rhodes and faked the Lady Septimus’s death (which would be easy enough to do with some blood samples and thanergetic spoofing of the cells). Many of these rescue attempts involved Camilla dueling and handily vanquishing Dulcinea’s own cavalier when he refused to join in on the plot.

Then they would spirit her back to the Library. Palamedes would be happy to have her nearby, and Dulcinea could convalesce in comfort, safe from the machinations of the irresponsible gene-tampering monsters that Palamedes said were the real rulers of the Seventh. Perhaps she could even brighten up the drab, gray universe of the Sixth; a hothouse flower in a temperate terrarium.

Cam broached this idea to Palamedes only once, when Dulcie had sent a particularly sparkling letter. Sometimes the manic, frothy flights of her oratory were proof of deterioration and exhaustion she didn’t want them to see. Palamedes looked up from the flimsy he was wrinkling between his hands and said nothing, only shook his head, although his eyes were suspiciously wet.

There were at least fifty solid legal reasons why the necromantic heir of one House would never be permitted to run away with, or marry, the necromantic heir of another. Palamedes had learned them all by the time he was sixteen, looking for loopholes, but they were genius-proof and utterly binding. Dulcinea Septimus could never have hidden in comfort at the Library, any more than she could have accepted the Warden’s proposal. If she had tried, her House would have prevented her. If they had managed to defy the Seventh, they would have been disavowed by the Sixth -- and eventually even reproved by the Second, if nothing else served to rein them in. Palamedes knew all of that.

It didn't help. It should have, but it didn't. He had finally found the one problem for which logic and data alone weren't enough.

He cried a little, there in the dark, fumbling his glasses off and resting his head against Cam’s. She knew the tears were a little bit for himself, and more for the young Duchess condemned to choke to death among fields of roses, surrounded by throngs of adoring admirers and not a single real friend.

“Go on,” he said at last, roughly, dragging his sleeve across his face, “tell me I’m a damned fool.”

Camilla lifted one eyebrow fractionally. “You want me to lie to you, Warden? After all this time?”

“Don’t flatter me,” he said sourly.

A beat passed. Then he said, “Apologies. You would never. I just — I feel like such an ass.”

“I know. It’ll be good for you.” That startled a snort out of him that was nearly a laugh. She went on, “You confirmed the null hypothesis. No shame in that.”

He settled his glasses back on his nose, the visible part of a spiritual and emotional process of pulling himself back together. "D'you think her cavalier's comforting her, too?"

"The other way round," Cam said promptly. "Pro's even more of a romantic than she is."

He sighed. Behind and beneath them the generators whirred, huge in their ubiquity, kicking up waste heat and the faint smells of bone dust and warm copper. Keeping the world on its axis. 

“What now?” asked the Emperor's lovelorn Reason.

Cam let him go with a loving shove to the left kidney. “Now you’re going to drown your sorrows in cataloguing errors, and tonight you’re going to have dinner with the Archivist.” She parried his heartfelt groan with a quick “If you argue, I’ll drop your favorite stylus in the composter.”

“You wouldn’t,” Palamedes said, and then, “Camilla Hect. Did I ever tell you that I’d be lost without you?”

“Evidence,” she replied, “outweighs testimony.”

5.

The letter arrived over breakfast, stuffed into an untidy stack of canary-colored expense vouchers. When the Warden pulled the stack towards him it slid out onto the table as neatly as a gallstone from a slit bile sac.

Camilla and Palamedes both froze. Anyone coming into the room just then would have thought the thing beside the Warden’s bowl of reconstituted porridge was a viper, not an envelope.

A viper would have provoked a less extreme reaction. The envelope’s design and dimensions were appallingly ancient, but it was the texture that made the color, what little there was of it, drain from the Warden’s face. He flinched — an instinctual, abortive lunge for the light panel. "Warden," Camilla said, and then he saw what she saw. The envelope was real paper, but it was glossy and fat, its smoothness carved by recent pen-strokes. It was _new._ It had years, perhaps decades left before it would need to be shielded from light.

"By God," the Warden said as he reached for it, "who would -- of course. The question contains the answer." With hands that hardly shook at all, he dug a thumbnail under the seal stamped with the laureate skull and slid the letter carefully out of its housing.

He held it pinched at two corners for the length of time it would take to gulp down a mug of tea. "Not Himself, I don't think," he murmured. "A clerical personage. Traveled a long way."

He read it without breathing, as though any movement might dislodge some crucial datum from his over-stuffed brain. Then he passed it across to Camilla. She read it twice and placed it carefully back atop its envelope, then pushed both to the center of the table, at maximum distance from all foodstuffs and out of the splash radius of any mugs.

They looked at it. They looked at each other.

"Lyctorhood," the Warden said at last. "What do we know about the ascension of the Lyctors?"

He meant _we_ in its royal sense, of his charge over the whole of the Library. He already knew the answer, but she said it anyway: "Not much. A dozen volumes, some artifacts. Most in preservation. Archeo will fight you."

"Let them blunt their claws on this." He was very nearly vibrating with undefined emotion -- excitement or fear, there was hardly a difference. "The greatest necromantic triumph of the age. The once-in-a-myriad process. Cam…"

"Warden." She couldn't keep still inside her skin. She rose and paced, cracking her knuckles. She wished she could crack her elbow joints. The Warden didn't even track her; he was staring into the middle distance, seeing visions of ascension theorems dancing across his spectacle lenses. She saw visions of combat-experienced cavaliers who would have little patience for pedantic asides about molecular structure and grammatical history.

There was a great deal to be done if the Warden was going to leave his Library for an unspecified length of time to pursue vaguely sacred revelations on a planet no one had visited in ten thousand years. For one thing, each of his offices had to be formally handed over to Scholars who would keep the Library machinery running without murdering each other over commas and decimal places. Generating the paperwork alone would take most of a week.

Mindless, finicky pencil-pushing was the second-best distraction Cam could have wished for outside Swordsman's Spire, and she buried herself in it. At least until the middle of the afternoon when Palamedes looked up, flashing his spectacles at her in the clinical lamplight of his office, and said, "You're afraid."

Cam shuffled a stack of forms 346A-F and slid them across the desk for his signature. "Perceptive, Warden."

"I don't think I've ever seen you afraid." Marveling, concerned, curious. Concern won out, but curiosity was never far behind. He peered at her, which most people found daunting. Cam had long been immune to the sheer beauty of his eyes, but she knew better than most how much they really saw. And she was not immune to the gentleness with which he said, “Maybe you’re right to be. But it’s an invitation, not a death warrant."

"Speculation," she countered.

"Confidence. You've been my cav since we were twelve and nobody's killed me yet."

“No one’s ever tried to kill you before. Not _really_ tried.”

“Just Sophia," he muttered darkly.

"Only the once. And you deserved it."

“She was the one who left the samples uncovered in the -- oh, forget it." He waved form 342A-iii at her like a white flag. "If the Necrolord Prime wanted us dead, he'd bomb us from orbit, not invite us to tea and an ancient history conference. Besides, what possible gain could another House expect from my untimely assassination? I’m more use to everyone alive -- no, I know,” he said, waving a forestalling hand to stop her protest, “can’t draw any conjectures until we have more data about the challenge parameters. Noted.”

“No domestics, no retainers,” Cam recited. “No witnesses, Warden. An academic conference doesn’t need cavaliers.”

He sucked on his teeth and sighed. "And a function that requires cavaliers involves some element of physical danger. All right: we'll stipulate unknown corporeal hazards in addition to unknown necromantic challenges." He stared at his hands for a minute as though counting the bones in them. “They’ll underestimate you,” he said at last. “That’ll be an advantage. We’ll have to be careful not to waste it.”

“They’ll be trained fighters, Warden,” she protested. “At least the Second and the Fourth. They’ll know how to assess a threat.”

“And they’ll see exactly what they’re looking for -- a couple of harmless librarians.” He smiled. “Everyone here underestimates you, and they _know_ you. No, we’ll have the element of surprise. We’ll have to save it for the right moment, of course. Assuming it comes down to fisticuffs. Swordicuffs.”

“ _Warden_.”

“I’ll put it in the dictionary. See if I don’t.”

Calmly she said, “One House will know exactly what we’re capable of.”

He did not freeze or flinch. Of course he didn’t. That had been his first thought, just as it had been Cam’s, but they’d let it slip aside, buried under a mountain of prosaic folderol. But it was there in astronomically expensive ink: _Eight we hope will meditate and ascend to the Emperor in glory._

He said, “Her lungs won’t last the trip. The recyc air in those shuttles —“

The sentence stopped abruptly, then trailed off without a coda, as though it had been struck a mortal wound only to quietly exsanguinate. Cam said, “She wouldn’t care if she died on the way. She’d never miss a chance like this.”

“Pro would stop her.”

“Name one time Pro stopped her from doing anything.”

The Emperor’s Reason slouched lower into his chair, into a shape so nearly parabolic it could have been used in a few of his more finicky thanergetic equations. "It won't change anything, if she's there. It can't. She doesn't -- desire any fraternization between our Houses, any more."

Camilla Hect was not shy about calling the smartest man in the Nine Houses an idiot, which was one of the reasons he loved her. She could do it with her eyes alone. "I'm sworn to protect you from all dangers --"

“You think Lady Septimus is a danger to me?”

“You’re bleeding all over the Archival transfer orders and all we've done is talked about her," she pointed out. This was true. He glared down at the hand he'd involuntarily tightened around the blade of a letter opener and blotted the worst of the blood onto his robes. Cam went on, "At this rate, I can't guarantee your safety if she bats her eyelashes at you."

"And what if she bats them at _you_?" This was entirely valid, and Cam acknowledged the hit with a grimace. "She won't work to bring harm to us, directly or indirectly," he said, more softly. "By God's marrow, I know that much, or else I'll have to give up my title and put on a hat with little bells. We just can't let each other get -- distracted."

"Just don't let the dying love of our lives distract us as we try to uncover the secrets of what only eight people in the last myriad have ever achieved," Camilla summarized. "Simple enough. When do we start?"

6.

The usual docking bay for supply shuttles was cramped and utilitarian, not really grand enough for the outstretched hand of the King Undying to reach forth and gather up the scions of His most learned House. Palamedes unearthed a ceremonial dock in the station’s schematics. Of course, it had long since been converted into book storage. An emergency committee had cleared it, but the smell of old tomes lingered, warm and dusty with the slightest hint of benign decay. 

Cam took a deep breath, let it settle her. They would surely have books on the First; you couldn’t gather necromancers in one place for any length of time without books accumulating around them through principles of spontaneous generation. But they would not be her books, and the planet they landed on would not be her planet. Even after months of anticipation and study she felt the strangeness of it, in the twist of her guts, in the taut protest of her ligaments.

Palamedes waited beside her. He was drawn up to his full height, every sense strained to its shattering point, eyes wide as impact craters, hands opening and closing spasmodically as though trying to suck psychometric data from the molecules of the air. She wouldn’t be surprised if was trying it. He had been the Warden when they walked out into the cavernous machine-lined space, and he would be the Warden again in a minute or two when he turned to bestow some parting remarks on his Senior Scholars. But just now he was Palamedes, which was to say, a feral and starving desire for knowledge fragilely bound into a knobbly human shell. This was the secret, the reason why they got on so well, was because underneath the civility of his titles he was just as single-minded in pursuit of answers as she was with a blade. Together --

Together, she thought as the landing lights of the gleaming Cohort shuttle flooded them in dazzle and glare, they might just get through this alive.

With months to prepare, they’d learned every scrap of information about every known Lyctor, and found it to be a pitiable hoard of nonsense. They’d schemed, conjectured, improvised, extrapolated. They’d made a truly exceptional number of graphs. Cam was positive she had the technical knowledge to repair the shuttle if it broke down mid-flight. The only thing they were missing was a survey of flora and fauna native to the House of the First, and that they could complete when they landed, if there was time. Yet in those lights, for the space of a heartbeat, everything she thought she’d known turned to entropy and dust; and beyond, once her vision cleared, the stars of the nightside sky mocked her with their vast incomprehensibility.

Then he gripped her hand, and the universe became once again a place of sense and order. ”Adaptability is survival,” he murmured, and then, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.” 

Ancient words, pre-Resurrection. They felt like the weight of a hilt in her hand, grounding her. She was twitchy as he was, and hadn’t noticed until she started to relax. 

He said, “Ready?”

He stepped forward and she followed, one half-step behind, toward the shuttle that would take them away from their families, their quarters, their treasures, their responsibilities, their world -- but not, she realized with a heady rush of relief, away from home. 

And the shuttle lifted off, took them away into a universe of love and death.


End file.
